Tag: cafe

Book of the Week: Big, Bad, and a Little Bit Scary

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

Big, Bad, and a Little Bit Scary, by Wade Zahares

We have two copies of this book, in case you want to develop a team lesson around it. It’s guided reading level P, so it’d be perfect to use as a formative assessment for end-of-3rd-grade standards (Federal Way 3rd graders should be at an instructional level of O-P by June).

Each poem is by a different author, and at least three of the poems meet the cognitive rigor detailed in Common Core Appendix A. I’ve copied “The Alligator,” “The Eel,” and “The Barracuda” into a document for your shared reading pleasure.

"Fall is Flying By"

On an unrelated note, you should definitely take a look at Zahares’ website, which includes a pretty impressive body of work. If I had unlimited funds, I’d get this print for our classroom. They feel like super-color-charged versions of art deco era WPA posters.

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

 

  • Check for understanding. Remind students that although many of the poems are short, it’s still important to pause and make sure they fully understand what was read. One reason this is particularly important is the use of figurative language. If a student reads too quickly and is somewhat familiar with the animal featured, they may assume some qualities, such as “They’ll strip off your flesh like you’d skin a banana” (from Dick King-Smith’s “Strippers”) can be taken literally.
  • Determine and analyze author’s purpose and support with text. November’s literacy focus of the month at Wildwood is author’s purpose, so I’ve been a bit fixated on this skill lately. Each of the poems (particularly the three I shared in the link above) are written in a distinctly different style, each of which seems influenced by the animal that’s the subject of the poems. Talk about the word choice, rhyming patterns, and phrase length in each of the three poems. How did the author’s choices change the mood of each poem?

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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Book of the Week: Rechenka’s Eggs

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

Rechenka’s Eggs, by Patricia Polacco

Watch the Reading Rainbow episode for Rechenka’s Eggs:

You can find this book and other texts by Patricia Polacco in the red book box labeled “Favorite Authors.” If you’d like to help expand our school’s collection of Polacco books, you might want to consider helping support this Donors Choose project.

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

Comprehension

 Behaviors That Support Reading

  • Select and read “Good Fit” books. If students like this Polacco story, they might also enjoy one of the dozens of other books she’s written. This might be a good choice for a student who avoids chapter book series, but is ready for more challenging text.

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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Book of the Week: Dear Benjamin Banneker

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

Dear Benjamin Banneker, by Andrea Davis Pinkney

You can preview this book on Google Books.

I wanted to highlight this as a book of the week because I know many grade-level teams have planned a unit highlighting interesting and inspiring Americans, and I wanted to make sure we have enough resources to support this unit.

Benjamin Banneker was a freed black man living in the late 1700s who ran a successful tobacco farm, published a successful almanac, and told off a young Thomas Jefferson for his hypocrisy in owning slaves.

Well-known books like this already have a bunch of full lesson plans available online, so there’s no real need for me to redo them. If you’re looking for a more in-depth project, you might want to take a look at:

Additionally, this book used to be an SFA text, so 30 copies are available for use as a shared text. If you use multiple bags of books, please make sure you check out each bag from the bookroom. There’s also an SFA teacher’s guide with vocabulary and comprehension questions.

We have enough of a collection of books by Andrea David Pinkney / Brian Pinkney that you might want to consider an author’s study of their work. See me if you’d like help putting this together!

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

Comprehension

  • Recognize literary elements (theme). Especially if this is part of a larger unit on inspiring Americans, you might want to explore some of these universal themes:

    • Persistence in the face of challenges
    • Standing up for what you believe in
    • A full life is well-rounded and allows you to develop your passions
    • Privilege plays a role in what individual determination can achieve (how would Banneker’s life be different if he hadn’t been born to a freedman? If he had been born closer to the civil war? If he was born in the South during the civil rights movement?)

  • Compare and contrast within and between text. The SFA skill focus for this book is compare and contrast. Please refer to the teachers’ guide in the book bag for more details.

Accuracy

  • Use the pictures… Do the words and pictures match? More complex words like observing, plotted, astronomy, and eclipse make sense in the context of this book. It would also be interesting to use this book with the Astro Adventures science kit, because students would already be primed to be more aware of sky-and-space related terms.

Behaviors that support reading

  • Select and read good-fit book. Benjamin Banneker taught himself astronomy! Amazing. The level of self-motivation he must’ve had is amazing. Our students need to strive to find topics and issues that interest them so they too can be motivated to take a lead role in their own successes. Use this book to reinforce the strategy of IPICK.

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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Book of the Week: How Animal Babies Stay Safe

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

How Animal Babies Stay Safe, by Mary Ann Fraser

You can see a Google Books preview of this book here.

Author/illustrator Mary Ann Fraser blogs pretty regularly. It’s always neat to see into an illustrator’s process, so you should check it out.

There is a lesson for first graders included with this mentor text. It includes suggested conversation ideas along with page numbers. The question prompts are also included as labels stuck to pages throughout the book. The included lesson focuses on these standards:

  • 1.5 Locates Information
  • 2.1 Comprehends important ideas and details
  • 2.1.2 Summarizes a simple text with guidance
A brief aside: WHY is it that when humans are featured as minor characters in a book about some totally different topic they are almost always straight-haired blonde/brunette white folks? This book was written in 2002. I wish there were more non-white characters in books that weren’t just about “issues.” See rad Michigan educator Colby Sharp’s views on this matter here.

Anyways. This book would work perfectly with The Bird Lady, a Level J guided reading text available in our bookroom. The information section in the back talks about what humans do when animals lose their support system, and Bird Lady is a critter rehabilitator.

There is also a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

Comprehension

  • Monitor and Fix Up. If you follow the lesson plan included, you will create a chart showing the different ways animals carry, protect, and provide shelter for their young. You can explain that this graphic organizer can help you monitor your comprehension — if you notice that you haven’t recorded anything in a page or two, there’s a chance that you missed some key information.
  • Recognize and explain cause and effect relationships. The book discusses many different actions that animals take to take care of their babies, all with the effect of keeping them safe. Talk with students about the idea that a cause (i.e. a crocodile putting her babies in her mouth) can also be an effect (A predator had to cause the crocodile to put the babies in her mouth in the first place). At the end of the book, Fraser talks about why it is that animals are so keen to protect their young. This could be used to explore the idea that although there are many smaller causes and effects in the book, they all fit under the overarching idea of protecting young animals.

Expand Vocabulary

  • Use prior knowledge and context to predict and confirm meaning. The lesson plan included in the book bag features a conversation about the word “instinct.”

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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CAFE menu board

I’m finally to the point in preparing the classroom where I can afford to take the time to pretty things up a bit. Here’s our reading corner, featuring our CAFE menu.

I think all our decisions in our classroom should be intentional, so here are some thoughts on what you see in the picture:

  • I don’t see a need to have the Daily Five choices themselves written anywhere all giant. As I introduce them, we write the choices on sentence strips and staple them under the daily schedule. After all, we do keep our T charts for expectations posted year-round, so they don’t need to take up much space here.
  • The empty room under the white paper explaining each CAFE category was left there intentionally. My students will post sticky notes with their names under each definition so we know what strategies they’re currently working on.
  • I want as much space as possible for our strategies, so this year I added a second column to accomodate all the comprehension strategies. For the record, I will be adjusting the burgundy paper so both columns are even. :)
  • The crab chair is named Oddvar. He’s from IKEA and I bring him around the classroom with me when I confer.
  • Chart markers are in a plant pot under the phone. I started using the pot after getting frustrated because I could never seem to get baskets and cups to work for my markers.
  • Our Word Collector will be located on the bulletin board to the right of the easel.
  • Do you see our class crests on the lower part of the whiteboard? So exciting!
  • The big “Day 1” on the white board is posted because we have a six-day schedule instead of just a Monday-Friday schedule. Tomorrow, I’ll post my schedule so you can see how I block out my time.

Questions or ideas for improvement? Let me know in the comments or by e-mail!

Book of the Week: Olly and Me

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

Olly and Me, by Shirley Hughes

This book is out of print, but we do have two copies in the mentor text bag in the bookroom. Although it looks like a regular children’s book (perhaps in the style of Eve Bunting), it’s actually a book of poetry. If you’ve been searching for a solid collection of free verse poetry, you’ve found it.

The author, Shirley Hughes, is apparently a household name across the pond in England. Her book Dogger was featured as The Guardian’s Classic of the Month in 2004.

The Guardian also posted a lengthy interview with Ms. Hughes in 2009, the best quote from which I believe is, “The idea that pictures are sternly removed from you as soon as you learn to read is a truly terrible one.”

I’d love to use this book to bridge from personal narrative writing into poetry, especially helping students realize the ideas they’ve generated for narrative can be transfered to another writing form.

One poem features a visit to the Natural History Museum. Poetry would be SUCH a neat way to reflect on a field trip!

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

Accuracy

  • Use beginning and ending sounds. The poem “Happy Birthday, Dear Mom” features a goodly collection of B words, without being a ridiculous tongue twister. In primary grades, this could be a good authentic text to pull /b/ sounds from.

Fluency

  • Voracious Reading. Voracious readers choose books written by both US and foreign authors. It could be worthwhile to talk about how a British accent might change the rhythm of poetry — sometimes rhyming words won’t rhyme if you say them in a standard Midwestern American accent. Many of our students have accents as well. How do our individual accents impact our oral and silent reading? This might even be an entry point into examining whether students are subvocalizing when they read silently.
  • Use punctuation to enhance phrasing and prosody. I’m not gonna lie, I still really struggle with figuring out how to read free verse poetry out loud. Do I stop at the end of the line? This runs counter to what we teach younger readers when they’re reading blocks of prose text. Or do I stop at the punctuation marks? What if there are no punctuation marks? If you need more practice like I do, The Writer’s Almanac often features non-rhyming poetry in its daily broadcast. Click on the “Listen” link, then fast forward to the end of the recording, which is when Garrison Keillor reads a poem out loud.

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

Book of the Week: Rachel Parker, Kindergarten Show-Off

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

Rachel Parker, Kindergarten Show-Off, by Ann Martin

Chances are, if you are of a certain age, Ann M. Martin means Baby-Sitters Club. Although she ended the series in 2000, she actually remains pretty active online, posting updates every few months to her Scholastic site. The biography posted there says she’s currently interested in writing books set in the 1960s.

If you’re interested in reading gearing-up-for-kindergarten books, you might want to touch base with Sarah Stock, because I know she’s been reading up on them lately. Plenty of great ones exist, but not many talk about someone moving to the class in the middle of kindergarten.

Conversely, plenty of books about students moving deal with the acquisition of new friends (including this year’s Battle of the Books novel Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls: Moving Day), but it’s a bit more rare to find one that looks at it through the lens of shifting classroom dynamics because of the addition of a new personality.

Last I checked with Bev, our transient rate has decreased to somewhere around 25-30 percent, but new class members is something bunches of our students can relate to.

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

Comprehension

  • Predict what will happen, use text to confirm. Older students who may be familiar with the basic “Happy about new kid, disappointed about new kid, BFFs with new kid” structure could be encouraged to go deeper in their predictions. What will their fall-out look like? How will the reconcile? How will they move forward with their friendship? How will their relationship impact the class at large?
  • Infer and support with evidence. Neither Rachel nor Olivia admit that they’re jealous of each others’ talents and home lives, but their actions and dialogue reveal they feel otherwise. This might also be a good point to talk about a reliable narrator — how do we know that some of what Olivia says is actually exaggerated or incomplete?

 

Fluency

  • Use punctuation to enhance phrasing and prosidy. This is one of those rare picture books where there’s actually paragraph indentation, especially indents due to dialogue. It’d be useful to point this out during a shared reading passage, or to use a passage in a writing workshop conversation about conventions.

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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Book of the Week: Arctic Babies

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

Arctic Babies, by Kathy Darling

Start typing here

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

Comprehension

Determine and analyze author’s purpose and support with text. When we’re reading nonfiction, I’ve often noticed my students will inevitably decide that the author wrote the book because they were interested in the topic they wrote about. That makes sense, after all, haven’t we been teaching them to write about what they’re interested in? But this could be an interesting book to dig a little deeper into that idea. The author is Kathy Darling, and the photos are by Tara Darling. Are they related? Do they visit the Arctic together? Tara Darling has photographed animals all over the world. You can find out more about the duo here. Tara has a Facebook page, too.

Compare and contrast within and between text. The format of this book makes it perfect for copying a few pages and giving them to students for a shared reading or working with a partner to compare and contrast two animals.

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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Book of the Week: The Three Billy Goats Gruff

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. Feel free to use anything you find useful, but comments are always appreciated!

The Three Billy Goats Gruff, by Paul Galdone

We talk a lot about filling in background knowledge of our high-poverty and ELL students. Lucky for us, we have a whole bunch of Paul Galdone’s traditional stories in our bookroom. I’ve seen The Three Billy Goats Gruff, obviously (it’s currently in the bucket of former SFA Roots books), The Little Red Hen, The Three Bears, and The Gingerbread Man. Combine this with all the James Marshall fairy tale books we have, and we’ve got a pretty solid collection. You might also want to talk with our Kindergarten team, as I know a few teachers did a fairy tale unit last year.

You can learn more about Galdone here, in a neat Seattle Times profile. Information on the Austrian-born artist and his work can also be found here, here, and here. You know I’m more than wary about Wikipedia, but I’m perplexed that I can’t find any “official” biographies. Holy COW, look at all the books he illustrated (scroll down to the bottom).

1958 book review in the St. Petersburg Times

Children’s book historian Leonard S. Marcus had this to say about Galdone’s works: “Knowing that copies of his books were bound for use in preschool and elementary school classrooms and public libraries, he planned his illustrations with the child in the last row at story hour in mind.” I love learning the thinking behind books, particularly picture books, which are so often dismissed by grown-ups as easy to write. You can see his illustration style in this sample of The Little Red Hen.

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggestions:

Comprehension

  • Use prior knowledge to connect with text. This goes along with asking questions, below. Ask (or chart) what traditional stories students have heard or seen. This will help you gauge familiarity with patterns such as the rule of three, etc.
  • Ask questions throughout the reading process. Before: What are some characteristics of traditional or enduring stories? During: What patterns do you notice in the structure of the story? Does it remind you of any other children’s stories? After: Why do you think the author says the troll was “as mean as he was ugy”? Do you often notice that the evil characters are ugly while the heroes are pretty or handsome? Why do you think many authors do this?

Fluency

  • Use punctuation to enhance phrasing and prosody. For primary students, talk about the all-caps words and the different tones the billy goats and troll might use. This would be a great shared reading opportunity to start with, because everybody will probably wind up sounding pretty silly. For older students, you could contrast the all-caps approach of conveying mood with more modern books like Geronimo Stilton, which uses multicolored, crazily-shaped text. How does technology impact the way books are written, published, and ultimately interpreted? How do these interpretations change over time?
Speaking of different interpretations of the Three Billy Goats, this is a tremendous resource.
Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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Book of the Week: Max Found Two Sticks

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom and I include a few mini-lesson ideas. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

Max Found Two Sticks, by Brian Pinkney

Brian Pinkney, like his father, the legendary Jerry Pinkney, has illustrated a ton of books. We have several in our school library if you’re interested in setting up an author study. Jojo’s Flying Side-Kick, Dear Benjamin Banneker, and Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King are all available, and if you check with our interventionists, we should have several copies of Jojo’s Flying Side-Kick from the Soar to Success program.

Holy cow, there are a ton of resources available to help students with this book. I find the choices overwhelming, quite frankly. This site has tools to help students with phonics, writing, comprehension, spelling, and vocabulary. If you’re someone interested in hard copy work, plenty of blackline masters are available here.

Additionally, if you want to use this book as part of the 3rd grade Sound science kit, that could be doable. There are a few other books on music in the bookroom in the bucket labeled Fine Art, and there are a bunch of leveled readers as well. (that will be a future post)

Drum vibrations

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

Comprehension

  • Recognize literary elements. The book follows a pretty traditional three-tries story structure (Max bangs on the bucket, the hat boxes, the garbage can, and then receives the marching band drummer’s sticks). Talk about why so many stories, particularly traditional folk/fairy tales follow this pattern. This is a good place to start if you want to explore patterns in literature. Here are the 36 dramatic plots identified by Georges Polti.
  • Compare and contrast within and between text. Use this strategy in conjunction with the one explained above!

Expand vocabulary.

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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